Wednesday, October 27, 2010

Obscure New Warriors!

To know Dan Slott is to love him.

Seriously, if you’ve ever had the pleasure of chatting with Dan even for a minute or seen him on a panel at a convention, you know what I mean. His enthusiasm and flat out glee for what he does is undeniable and infectious. Dan can’t help but get worked up about what he’s writing or what he’s reading or just being two seats down from Stan Lee, and not in a “look what I’ve accomplished” sort of way, but in a “holy crap, I’m living my dream and loving it!” kind of way.

He’s one of my wife’s favorite creators and she’s never even read anything he’s done, she’s just met him a bunch of times.

When we were doing Marvel.com Live at New York Comic Con, we had a family of cosplayers with a little Wolverine up during Dan’s interview time, and I swear getting to talk with that little boy about why he loved Spider-Man was better for Dan than winning an Eisner. He’s just a joy.

So it’s with great regret that I pick a nit with Mr. Slott, however, as Antonio Banderas would say…but I must.

See, yet another thing I love about Dan is he digs the New Warriors perhaps as much as I do, and as a successful comic book writer, he has the power to ensure they continue to appear throughout the Marvel Universe (whereas I was unable to get Sprocket into any of my War of Kings: Warriors one-shots or Werewolf By Night short story), an ability he has wielded with awesome results from She-Hulk to Avengers: The Initiative.

But y’see, while Dan has been good enough to keep the likes of Justice, Rage and even Hindsight Lad in circulation, I must take exception on behalf of several lesser-known (yes, lesser-known than Hindsight Lad) Warriors who continue to languish in limbo while The Slottster continues to insist that Slapstick joined off panel (to be fair, he eventually showed the flashback in an Initiative issue and it was pretty cool).

So Dan and any other creators possibly named Christos Gage or Sean McKeever or Jay Faerber who may be reading (but not you, Todd Nauck…ok, you too), I beg of you to find a home for these forgotten Heroes of the 90’s…

HELIXA bastard child of the Spider-Man Clone Saga, this dude I mostly remember because he had the Daken long hair Mohawk a decade earlier and because his costume consisted primarily of the pads/pouches everybody had in the 90’s but as part of his skin. His powers were similar to Darwin from X-Factor, where he basically just adapted to whatever was thrown at him (so the Scarlet Spider figured out how to beat him when he was initially introduced and on a rampage by telling everybody to just stop attacking the poor guy). Also, Turbo was teaching him to speak English (he was Hispanic). He never actually joined the Warriors proper, just hung out on some missions, but I mostly want him back to see how an artist of today would depict that look.

POWERHOUSEFor a minute I thought we hadn’t seen Power Pack outside of their excellent all-ages book and Julie showing up in Loners, but then I remembered that Jonathan Hickman is using Alex over in Fantastic Four, so this is a moot point. Still, I loved Alex Power as part of the New Warriors, from his siblings being pissed at him for constantly stealing their powers to him apologizing to Nova for taking the names of one of his old bad guys (he was originally Powerpax, which 13-year-old Ben thought was the greatest codename ever).

TIMESLIPMr. Slott actually did use Timeslip during Civil War in She-Hulk and apparently either Jim McCann or Todd Nauck snuck her into an X-Men story in the same Holiday Special as my aforementioned Werewolf By Night epic, but we need some more Rina Patel in the Marvel Universe. I thought it was cool and unique the way she had a potentially bad ass power like being able to jump through time, but also a slow learning curve in first figuring out how to control and then use it offensively; she was also a pretty decent and not over-the-top Indian character, so that’s not a bad thing. She’d be cool doing a guest spot in New Mutants, or maybe in Avengers Academy since her and Speedball had a thing for a whole second.

THE OTHER TURBOMike Jeffries was a whole bundle of untapped potential. He was a comics fanboy who found a super hero suit and then had to deal with being awful at using it and his super-hot but completely platonic female being awesome at it—talk about your empathetic character for readers! His death was actually really gut-busting and well-written by Evan Skolnick (who deserves a hat tip on this list as the co-creator of Timeslip, primary shepherd of Helix and the guy who carried the baton passed by Fabian Nicieza for a solid 20-plus issues), but I’d love to see a flashback or two.

SILHOUETTEY’know, I actually never really got behind Silhouette despite her having like 50 issues to grow on me, plus she had a way more significant role in Civil War than half the Marvel Universe, so let’s move on to…

THE OTHER SPEEDBALL…the time-travelling second Speedball who wasn’t Speedball! Darrion Grobe cloned Speedball’s body and then used future technology to friggin’ live inside it so he could pose as him and stop his own crazy time-travelling dad Advent from destroying the world by dying in Robbie Baldwin’s place and saving Ben Reilly’s life in the process. I have no idea what I just wrote, but Darrion (another Skolnick creation) was pretty dope in an insane way and ended up being alive in an idyllic future with his reformed old man, so I’d love to see him return to the present and yell at Speedball for being emo. Yours for free, Gage!

Thanks, Ben! Out of the six characters you mentioned, I co-created four and renamed a fifth. And as Dan mentioned, I did co-create Helix (with Patrick Zircher) though I wasn't credited as such because his first appearance wasn't in an issue I wrote.

I didn't remember Dan offering up the "Helix" name but I'll take his word for it since, as you said, to know Dan is to love him. Helix was in my original NW proposal but with the name "Metamorph", which I guess ended up being legally tied up.

Glad to hear you liked so many of my Marvel creations. Do you have a few million friends? :-)

Evan,It was at that diner near 387. (Not The American, which had the "green bread", but the Greek named one.)

At the same lunch, I coined my Hydra-knocking-on-the-Warrior's-Crashpad's-door gag ("Can we borrow a cup a' sugar? Got any sugar?")... which I did FAR too many times at far too many lunches after. And that, good sport that you are, you eventually threw into the book. :-P

I can't decide whether you've given me more crap over the "HYDRA agents in the basement" issue of NEW WARRIORS or the final level location of MUA2. You've had more time on the former but have made an aggressive effort on the latter.